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“You think someone hurt her?”
“Not exactly.” She took a deep breath. “I think she hurt herself. It wouldn’t have been the first time she tried to. She talked about it, you know. Suicide. When she first got her diagnosis—it was terrifying to her, the idea of losing herself that way. That was one of the reasons I wanted her to live at Willowcrest, so that there would be someone to monitor her. But the truth is, nothing was going to stop my mother from dying if that’s what she wanted to do. I’ve made my peace with that.”
I hesitated, and my mother squeezed my knee again. “What is it?”
“It’s just... when she died. She had her boots on. Her winter boots. And I thought...” I trailed off, painfully aware of the quaver in my voice. I sounded pathetic, childish, the amateur true crime podcast listener who thought she was a detective. My mother looked confused—and then anguished.
“Oh no. So you thought—fuck, this really is my fault,” she said savagely, and looked up at me, smiling but with tears in her eyes.“Don’t you understand? She could have tied them herself. She always could. I just made a big deal about doing it for her because I knew it embarrassed her. Having to need someone else, depend on someone else, she hated that. And after everything she’d put me through, I liked having that little bit of power.”
We both cried then, but only for a little while. Then we opened a bottle of wine, lit the fire, and my mother talked for a long time as the sun went down and the wind picked up. She told me things I’d never known about her childhood, her life, her marriage, and what came after. She told me what it was like to be my mother, and to be my grandmother’s daughter. She told me she wasn’t sure what to do with herself now that she had nobody to take care of. She laughed when I said that she could always get a dog.
The muttering of the house was a constant as our voices rose and fell, until I threw another log on the fire and said, “I just can’t get over it. The way Mimi talked about your father, he sounded like, I don’t know, something out of a movie. The perfect guy. And he cheated on her. How could she make it all sound so romantic when that was how it ended?”
My mother took a long sip. “It ended because my father died. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t? Maybe they would’ve reconciled, or maybe not.” She paused. “But your grandmother lived without a husband much longer than she lived with one. She had a whole life after he was gone, and I think it was a very good life. It’s a shame she didn’t remember more of it, latch onto one of those pieces instead—but I guess that’s the thing. You don’t get to decide what stays with you at the end.”
“You could have told me,” I said.
“What? That her marriage wasn’t the fairy tale she made it out to be? Why would I ever do such a thing? You loved her stories, and she loved sharing them with you. If she made things up or left things out—well, so what? That doesn’t make it worth any less. It was your time with her that mattered.”
“I miss her,” I said and drained my glass. My mother reached out and refilled it.
“So do I.”
We sat in silence for a while. I allowed my eyelids to droop. I was drunk but comfortable. Cozy. It was nice to listen while someone else talked. To let my mother take over the storytelling, to untangle the knotted history of so many intersecting lives. I was nearly asleep when the quiet was interrupted by the sound of my mother’s phone buzzing. I opened my eyes to see her pulling it from her pocket; she looked at the screen, frowned, and looked up at me.
“What?” I said.
“Do you know what this is about?” she asked, holding out the phone. My stomach sank as I looked at it. It was from Richard.Can’t stand the suspense,it said.Have you talked to Del?
“I—” I started to say when the phone buzzed again. She pulled it back, reading aloud.
“‘Do tell the young fellow I said welcome to the family,’” she said, knitting her brows together. “What on earth? I haven’t said a word about Jack to anyone, how could he possibly—”
She stopped talking as a strangled noise rose from the back of my throat. I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. My mother stared at me, confusion flickering over her face—and then slowly her gaze shifted to the ring on my hand. Back to me. Back to the ring.
“Delphine,” she said, and because I thought I might scream if I opened my mouth, I just stared back at her and nodded imperceptibly. In a few moments, my mother would be peppering me with questions, and it would be my turn to talk. But in this moment, she just said, “Butwho?” and I said, “Well, first of all, Adam’s not gay,” and watched as understanding dawned on her face, as her eyes opened wide, as she started to laugh. I thought again of that rhyme, the one about secrets. Mimi had tried to keep hers, wrapping it up in a fantasy of how things could have been, hiding the shame and heartbreak just like she’d hidden her valuables away. Out of sight, out of mind, until she no longer remembered where she’d left them, until it was like they’d never been hers at all.
She thought the truth would die with her. She’d wanted it to. But that was the thing, I thought.
Secrets, secrets, are no fun. Somebody always tells.
24.
2015
February
“Well, if you do decide to get married here on the island, I would be delighted to help,” said Reverend Frank, smiling at me over the top of his coffee mug.
It was my third visit in as many weeks, but this one would be my last. My car was already packed for the cross-country drive: I would head south tomorrow, stopping to say hello to friends in New York and spending a night with my mother in New Jersey, then turning west and heading toward Los Angeles. I had no itinerary and no firm plans. The next mark on my calendar was weeks out, at the end of the month, when I would meet with a friend of Richard’s whose production company had an opening for a script reader. It was the least he could do, Richard had told me, given that he felt at least partially responsible for inspiring me to what he would not stop referring to as “an act of caffeinated violence.” He also seemed to think we were going to be friends once I arrived, inviting me to move into his poolhouse for as long as I liked until I found an apartment. Weirder still, I was seriously considering this offer. It sounded . . . fun.
I had long since finished my own coffee and was nervously twisting the garnet ring on my finger, something I seemed to do every time I talked or thought about the engagement. There was space in my car for Adam’s bags, and room for him in both the passenger seat and Richard’s pool house, but everything else about our future together was an open question. It wasn’t that I didn’t want it; it was more like I couldn’t imagine it. A cross-country road trip had always been on that list of things we’d do someday—we’d fantasized about eating greasy drive-in food, taking cheesy pictures, stopping to see offbeat attractions like the World’s Largest Taxidermied Bat—but now that it was actually happening, it didn’t feel real.
Reverend Frank was wondering if I was falling into old patterns, those same old trust issues. I was telling him that on the contrary, taking a leap like this—new state, new fiancé, new life, and no plan—was entirely a new thing for me.
“You know you make a face every time you say that word,” he said.
“What?”
